Ceramic capacitors exhibiting a benign or graceful failure mode in which a multitude (hundreds or even thousands) of discrete failure events lead toward a gradual loss of capacitance before the capacitor fails to perform acceptably are described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,099,141, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. This type of capacitor is comprised of a base electrode on which is deposited a relatively thin dielectric layer. Thereafter, a very thin top electrode is deposited on the ceramic layer. The thinness of the ceramic layer and the top electrode layer are important for providing high capacitance in a small volume capacitor. The thinness of the top electrode layer facilitates a benign or graceful failure characteristic. More specifically, the thinness of the top electrode allows the electrode to melt and vaporize when rapid highly localized temperature increase occurs during a defect failure, which, in turn, causes adjacent metal of the electrode to melt and vaporize. The thinness of the top electrode allows complete vaporization and loss of metal (i.e., “self-clearing”) at the area of the failure. As a consequence, the failure is isolated to a very small area of the capacitor, and complete clearing of the electrode material at the area of failure prevents shorting that would result in complete or catastrophic failure. Accordingly, these ceramic capacitors may also be described as being short-resistant.
A problem with the thinness of the top electrode is that many contacts and/or leads may be necessary to safely carry current to and/or from the top electrode. Conventional lead connection techniques involve application of additional material (e.g., a contact pad) to the surface of the top electrode, effectively increasing the thickness of the metal at the area of the lead connection. This additional thickness of the metal prevents complete evaporation clearing of metal in the event of a failure at the lead connection, and, therefore, results in shorting, and a complete or catastrophic failure of the capacitor.